Eben Alexander's NDE: Cook excerpt #23

Nick Cook writes: The neuroscientist whose NDE resulted in his best-selling book ‘Proof of Heaven’⁶⁹, Dr Eben Alexander, said that cross-over data gathered from the modalities may be key to our understanding of the interconnectedness of consciousness.

Dr Alexander became ill with acute bacterial meningoencephalitis in November 2008 and quickly fell into coma. For the next seven days he remained on a ventilator – scans of his brain showed massive damage. This, however, was his portal into an extraordinarily rich NDE, in which his conscious awareness was transported through levels of experience to arrive finally at what he described as ‘the Core’, a void ‘filled to overflowing with the infinite healing power of the all-loving deity at the source’.

Hoffman’s ideas are interesting, Dr Alexander told me, but they don’t go far enough⁷⁰. “The literature is there, the data is there – it’s not as if we need to ask what we have to do next to prove this.” This doesn’t mean, he went on to say, that we don’t have a lot more work to do to uncover what he calls the ‘mechanisms of consciousness’ – as a neuroscientist he remains intrigued by the way in which we communicate with the ‘deeper realms’ – psychedelic drugs, or entheogens, as he refers to them, being a case in point.

In his second book, ‘Living In A Mindful Universe’⁷¹, Dr Alexander quotes a 2012 report from Imperial College London, in which fMRI was used to evaluate various brain regions under the influence of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms.

The most remarkable finding, he wrote, was that it demonstrated a reduction in activity of the major connection regions of the brain in those who were having the most profound psychedelic experiences – the opposite of what was expected.

This may be evidence, he told me, that DMT*, LSD, psilocybin and other entheogenic plant medicines are affecting the brain’s ‘main calculator’, the neocortex, and in so doing “revealing the vast reality that exists that we’re not normally aware of – the reality that comes into view in near-death and shared-death experiences. It’s by going into that ancient circuit that you can actually separate your conscious awareness from the here and now of the physical brain and the sense of self.”

*Dimethyltryptamine

 

69 Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, Dr. Eben Alexander, Piatkus, 2012.
70 From my interview with him on 15.12.20.

71 Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, Dr. Eben Alexander, Piatkus, 2017.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.